Planet Rock

Paradoxically, or maybe not, hip-hop is at once the fastest spreading
and most local pop music in the world. The media-saturated,
electronically hooked up world, anyway. Ethnomusicologists mourn the
indigenous idioms that mutate or fall into disuse once their
practitioners get a load of Bucharest or Bangui, and in a sense,
hip-hop reverses this process, not musicologically but
emotionally. From 'hood to city to coast, what other pop genre makes
so much of geography? Early rock and roll lived off a dynamic in which
the local went national, usually from a base of local radio; now,
local radio barely exists, and even in the Internet-surfing,
CD-scarfing indie/college realm, local scenes rarely generate local
sounds or more than a smattering of local references. In hip-hop,
styles are regionally distinct, although they certainly crossbreed,
and representing where you're from is the rule, especially when you're
coming up. Hip-hop speaks so loudly to rebellious kids from Greenland
to New Zealand not because they identify with young American blacks,
although they may, but because it's custom-made to combat the anomie
that preys on adolescents wherever nobody knows their name.

The aforementioned antipodes weren't picked out of thin air; I got
them from a book and a CD. The book is a recommended anthology from
Wesleyan called Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA,
edited by Australian cultural studies lecturer Tony Mitchell, whose
own chapters concern Italy and, yes, New Zealand, home to a Maori
hip-hop subculture spearheaded by the long-running Upper Hutt
Posse. The CD is a recommended compilation on Hip-O called The Best
of International Hip-Hop, whose single best track originated in, I
wouldn't believe it either, Greenland: the even longer-running Nuuk
Posse's "Uteqqippugut," a/k/a "Back in Business." Since hearing most
of the acts referenced in the book is next to impossible in America,
it's good to have the record despite its awful notes ("The land of
Aristotle and Socrates found its 21st century hip-hop philosophers in
Terror X Crew"). But there's little overlap. France, Japan, and
Australia are the only countries that make both, with Canada, the
U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Korea, and New
Zealand (plus Basque nationalists and Muslims) described in Global
Noise and Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Croatia,
Greece, Israel, Greenland, Argentina, Algeria, and South Africa
represented on The Best of International Hip-Hop.

Assuming the book is accurate (only the Canadian chapter seems inept,
but selective reporting is a temptation of such projects), hip-hop is
different wherever you find it. In Germany its pop breakthrough dates
to 1993, as does a familiar schism: "old school" purists, an
Italian-Ghanaian-Haitian immigrant trio rapping "in clear German"
about racism, versus white schlagermeisters from the south
sprechstimming romantically over "highly polished breakbeat stylings"
and insisting that rap doesn't equal hip-hop--which is linked by both
sides to not just freestyling but breaking and graffiti. In Japan,
having rhymed to the best of their abilities in an unaccented language
whose sentences all close on the same handful of verb endings, rappers
divide up "underground" (focus of a huge and intense late-night club
scene) and "party" (pop in the extreme Japanese Tastee-Cake sense); at
consecutive outdoor concerts, the audience for the former was 80
percent male, for the latter 80 percent female. Elsewhere the music is
far more rudimentary--a techno-flavored symbol of American wealth and
worse in Bulgaria, a stylistic trapping in Korea, where the big star
is a lower-middle-class surrogate rebel who got large protesting an
educational grind more joyless and authoritarian than Japan's. Most
telling is the Australian chapter, centered on Def Wish Cast,
"westies" from the underclass suburbs 30 miles on the inland side of
Sydney, who since the 1980s have given their all to a hip-hop culture
open to anyone who gives his or her (usually his, natch) all to it. It
opens with headman Ser Reck laying down the hip-hop law to author Ian
Maxwell: "They'll tell you it's a black thing, man, but it isn't. It's
our thing."

And with the obvious reservations, he's got a right. Ser Reck isn't
dissing the African American originators of the music he's made his
life--he reveres them. But he's not them, and good for him for knowing
it. Instead he's constructed the identity and authenticity he craves
on a model learned from hip-hop--a model that however arbitrary its
specific rituals (graffiti and break dancing again) reconceives
community at least as explicitly as the hippies did 35 years ago. Ser
Reck works, commits, represents. Hip-hop is his. But unless you're
Australian--and probably not then unless you're also young, alienated,
rebellious, male, etc.--his hip-hop is unlikely to be yours even if
you're in the market for rocked-up Public Enemy on a definitive 1992
CD that'll run you 35 smackers shipped. Although Maxwell devotes a
rapturous paragraph to the fondly remembered funk spell of "White
Lines," his only musical description of the local stuff contrasts Ser
Reck's "ragged, guttural, barking," Australian delivery against "the
smooth, mellifluous flow of a NAS or a Dr. Dre."

Ah yes, music. Long before rock and roll, the local-goes-national
dynamic went global with Italian opera and fake ragtime, but that kind
of move is rare. Which is why The Best of International Hip-Hop
stood quietly on my not-bad shelf for a year before Global Noise
opened me up. Turns out it's a fun record, and a revealing one,
full of catchy beats and local flavors. If you want deep funk,
Timbaland or Organized Noize or RZA or Mannie Fresh, listen
elsewhere. What prevails instead is remarkably consistent despite its
all-over-the-place provenance, maybe even the real world-beat--a
generally uptempo electro groove with universal hooks, insistent
basslines, off-and-on scratching, and such sound effects as oud from
Algeria, balalaika from Greece, and whale from Greenland, plus no
doubt a few folk melodies. Far from disrupting music that might
otherwise go down queasily lite, the language shifts texture it, with
the coughed-up consonants of Greenlandic, Croatian, and Hebrew
especially welcome.

Apparently some of the rhymes are interesting too, but when
Fijian-Australian Trey comes on, it's not her modest boast that'll
perk you up, or even her dulcet female tone--it's her English per
se. This isn't chauvinism, it's aesthetics. Although "flow" can mean
anything, just like "beats," its relationship to language is always
one of its prime pleasures. You don't have to get every word to hear
how a rapper's phrasing, intonation, pronunciation, and timbre inflect
meaning, reshape sonics, and fuck with the other man's culture. But
you have to get some of them. Thus, Nuuk Posse's hip-hop, say, is even
less likely to be an English speaker's than Def Wish Cast's. When it
comes to African American music, I scoff at talk of cultural
imperialism. Only a Frenchman could imagine that white capitalists
conspired to impose Negroes on the world. But English's status as a
lingua franca has always helped African American music get
over. That's why Frenchmen invented francophonie.

Skeptical of French pop, and with my experience limited to MC Solaar's
mellow-to-a-fault, never-quite-released-stateside 1997
Paradisiaque, I was intrigued by Global Noise's account
of French hip-hop as an oppositional music dominated by Muslim and
Muslim-identified immigrants, then surprised to learn from my general
nosing around that hip-hop of every sort is a much bigger deal in
France than in the U.K. or anywhere else besides America. Perhaps
prodded by the Senegalese-born rapper's sometime collaborator Missy
Elliott, Elektra has taken a flier on Cinquieme As (Fifth Ace),
the latest by Solaar, a violence-hating, million-selling girl magnet
who's barely described in Global Noise. Although the beats
continue to go down too easy, they have rather more body than those on
Paradisiaque, and when I read along or just concentrate, I can
appreciate his flow--but still not its verbal components, including
what insults it does or doesn't visit on la belle langue.
Musically, I'm more taken with what little I've heard of Marseilles's
Sicilian-led, all-Muslim, multiethnic IAM. But even were I to beef up
my spoken French, their slang and accents would be beyond me.

So it's no surprise that my favorite non-English rap album to date is
the Sahel-generated Africa Raps comp Michaelangelo Matos pumps
elsewhere in this section. Whatever localism's undeniable validity and
just rewards, black people have always been best at taking it
worldwide. Be it nurture or nature, rhythm is at the forefront of
their musical skills--on Africa Raps, the goddamn Ousmane
Sembčne dialogue sample has some funk--and also at the forefront of
hip-hop. So it's striking that African hip-hop is ignored in Global
Noise. Equally striking is a half-articulated anti-essentialist
resentment of the African American claim on hip-hop. It's as if Jay-Z,
to choose our biggest willie, is merely a point man for cultural
imperialism--although the perp actually named is that tireless profit
taker and hip-hop ambassador Chuck D, who's criticized for disdaining
white fans in Bilbao and white rappers in Sydney.

Maybe that's what Jay-Z gets for rapping over a cushier rhythm bed
than Europeans can manage at a five-star hotel. Maybe it's what Chuck
D deserves for agitating hearts whose pain he can't comprehend. But
what if the dislocated continuity that animates each rapper's deep
funk fills a need that upbeat electro cannot? What if it's such a
vivid aural metaphor for all attempts to re-create community in this
undoing world that no roots rap however authentic can replace it? What
if it's just better music? What happens to the local then?